Stanford Evo 2 AI model generates phages against E. coli

Stanford researchers successfully synthesized nearly 300 phages using the Evo 2 AI model. The group was narrowed down to 16 phages that exhibited strong activity against E. coli. The work focuses on the bacteriophage ΦX174, which offers a compact test system, containing fewer than 6,000 base pairs compared to the roughly 3 billion in the human genome. Evo 2 generates DNA sequences from a small snippet of a phage genome. The researchers instructed the model to produce the entire ΦX174 genome in a single pass. This process generated thousands of candidate genomes before the team selected sequences for chemical synthesis and laboratory testing.